HILL from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.

For the past seven years, Alan Hill has lived in an old, abandoned Packard factory in Detroit, Michigan. When asked what strikes him as unconventional, he points out the obvious: no hot water, no paper delivered to the front door, and nobody to cut the grass. He also has a sense of humor, recalling the day he first moved in and realized he could park his car inside the house.

Hill is the subject of a beautifully shot installment of This Must Be the Place, a series of short films exploring notions of home. Filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui follow Hill into an abandoned, 2-acre auto factory, where Hill has taken on the role of a custodian. To most, the piles of debris and scrap metal are unsightly, and the site is the materialization of destitution and disarray—perhaps the antithesis of a home. Hill, however, sees his occupation as a happy marriage. His fringe living has relieved him of the burdens of mortgages and credit card payments. It has afforded him a freedom thought to be extinct, an optimism that seems all but extinguished in ruinous Detroit.  “It’s like having a farm with a roof over it, you know?” he tells the cameras.

But Hill is far from blasé. His occupation of the Albert Khan-designed Packard factory is resistant not only to the system, so to speak, but also to the way America’s cities are changing physically. “These days, you build something out of sheet metal and put some plastic insulation in it, and that’s the home, and that’s the new store, and that’s the new factory. That’s the way the world is. We can’t really dispute it,” he explains. “In 20 years, people won’t even know this place.” But while Hill is alive, this one Packard factory will be too.

[via Vimeo]

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21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art from Tramnesia on Vimeo.

Adolf Loos once famously praised his own work for its resistance to being captured through photography. To Loos, great architecture has a complexity that eschews compression into two-dimensional media. To assume that a photograph can faithfully represent space is foolish. But is it possible that where photography falls short, video can preserve and deliver? That I’ll leave for you to decide, but a recently completed short film on SANAA’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art attests to the ability of film to tease out the essence of a building.

As part of a larger documentary about life in the Japanese seaside town of Kanazawa, Michael Kim’s filmic portrait of the museum focuses not on the form and structure of the building but rather on the architecture’s relationship with site and its interaction with visitors. Though the camera wanders from light, airy spaces into intimate rooms and dark corridors and back, the film also follows visitors, attendants and museum staff, tracking the squeaking of snow boots across the museum floors and capturing a visitor enwrapped in the quietude of Atelier Bow-Wow’s free-standing cylindrical bookshelf. There is a distinctly Japanese quality about the architecture that undoubtedly surfaces in photographs but comes through powerfully in Kim’s masterful orchestration of moving imagery and sound.

(And don’t forget to check out Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool installation at 4:19!)

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100 Yen: The Teaser Trailer from Strata Studios on Vimeo.

For those outside of it, Japanese culture can seem impenetrable, like an enclosed terrarium that breeds fascinating, inexplicable visions, ideas, and customs. And within it, one will find an even more insular subculture, one centered around the steadfast phenomenon of Japanese video games. Subculture can hardly be used to describe the cult of the Japanese arcade, which is the subject of a new documentary called 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience. Producer Brad Crawford burrows deep into downtown Tokyo, where five story buildings filled with arcade cabinets extend their neon signs outward and tower over the narrow streets. “Welcome to Japan,” the film’s Indie GoGo campaign explains, “a place where the arcades of the 80s and 90s not only exist but thrive and have evolved into an elaborate, unmatched gaming experience.”

The trailer gives a glimpse of sights we may have seen before: a line of Japanese youth, seated stationary before a row of arcade cabinets; a duo moving effortlessly on a neon platform to a manic display of light and sound; a gamer crammed into a booth, eyes fixed on a screen while fingers coordinate joystick movements and button-mashing. Meanwhile a voiceover tells us in Japan, “it’s not fun; it’s our life to be the best.” We were particularly intrigued by the teaser’s peek into the architecture of Japanese arcades: “As you get more involved with games, you’ll find yourself heading higher and higher in the arcade. That’s essentially how the arcades are designed,” another voiceover explains. Looks like this documentary may take us to the top floor.

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TILT – PANIC ROOM from BIG ADDICT on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago, a little known hotel room in Marseille, France took the Internet by storm with an installation called ‘Panic Room’ by street artist Tilt. With half of its space blanketed in layers of graffiti and the other half left untouched in alarmingly sterile white, ‘Panic Room’ dazzled with its spatially disorienting décor, condensing two antithetical places into one. Curbed Philadelphia recently posted a video of the artistic process, showing Tilt and his crew during their slow and partial takeover of the at one time spotless installation site.

The artists immediately look out of place walking into the stark white setting while dressed in paint-crusted jeans and fitted caps. But as shown in the video, they quickly make themselves at home. They whip out spray canisters and methodically tag the riotous half of the room, creating incredible ‘halved’ pieces of furniture and carefully framed images in the process. The process is both freeform and calculated, beautifully weaving together the utmost precision with patented street art improvisation. The true satisfaction comes when the painter’s tape peels off, the bed sheet falls into place, the graffitied cactus is set on the table, and the perfect division between chaos and order is revealed.

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Philagrafika Presents Gomez + Gonzalez: Doing Time / Depth of Surface from Philagrafika on Vimeo.

The built environment renews itself in waves, whether we like it or not. Though some cities have done better than others to preserve traces of the architectural past, in our present economic era, any living or built organism that fails to prove its purpose risks eradication. It’s an uphill battle for architectural preservationists, and more often than not, buildings that capture an outdated zeitgeist are deemed obsolete and replaced.

The Holmesburg Prison in Northeast Philadelphia, built in 1896, is one such structure. Taking the design of the wheel-and-spoke panopticon pioneered at John Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary, Holmesburg likewise fell into disuse, and in 1995 it closed its doors and quickly fell into disrepair. How does one preserve a work architecture that faces impending ruin? Artists and art conservationists Patricia Gómez and Maria Jesus González took up the challenge during their artists’ residency at Holmesburg Prison.

Their approach was to use a technique known as strappo, a procedure developed for removing frescoes that involves the application of glues and fabrics onto the walls. Once set, the applied film is peeled away, effectively transferring the flaking paint of the abandoned vaults directly onto massive sheets of canvas. As the artists told Philagrafika, “The wall is ‘marked by accidents—through the passing of time and use—that create the image. These traces and accidents are the signature of time, representing social, historical, and sentimental information that could disappear.”

The technique allows the artist to ‘print’ architectural spaces, creating to-scale images of historic interiors. Despite their inevitable abstraction of the original spaces, the canvases capture some of the building’s pure geometries along with the layered aesthetic details of its long tenure. Gómez and González were careful to specify their unique form of preservation as a branch of printmaking rather than mural removal, viewing the paint itself as a mutable surface “imprinted by time and vital experiences” and, in its final stage, grafted onto a receptive blank surface.

The canvases are currently on view at a show called Doing Time | Depth of Surface at the Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design until March 17.

[Video and images via Philagrafika]

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Eldhús intro from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

If you follow Iceland on Facebook or Tumblr, you’re familiar with the country’s endless stream of sweet neologisms and first-person chatter (“A very nice human from the NASA has put a photo of my northern lights on his inter-nets. It is in very much reso-lution. Bless Bless.”). The country has a prolific social media team working to popularize Icelandic happenings online.

A post this morning invites followers to RSVP to an fairly unusual restaurant: Eldhús, a diminutive red gabled home on wheels that only has room for four diners at a time.

The size of Eldhús’ dining room ensures two things: first, each meal will be a rare collective experience shared between chef and diner. Second, putting the whole operation on wheels empowers chefs to explore the diverse bounties of Iceland’s varied terrain. According to Eldhús, chefs will range from celebrities to farmers. Heimir, the Eldhús “butler,” drives the van and coordinates stops along the way. The project runs for a brief twelve days, ending on the 18th of March.

And yes, of course, you can RSVP through Facebook.

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Last year, Jayson Musson, a.k.a. Hennesy Youngman, a.k.a. ‘Art Thoughts,’ helped shed a little light on Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of Relational Aesthetics, explaining the 90’s art movement as “when someone with an MFA wants to meet new people, but because they spent all that time pursuing their MFA, they don’t know how to talk to people normally, and they got really poor social skills, and they can’t find no other way to meet new people other than forcing them into odd activities at their own poorly attended art openings,” all while laying back in a Spiderman fitted cap and a tangle of bling around his neck.

The movement Youngman spoke of inspired a small but notoriously wide scope of work in its brief heyday, ranging from Rikrit Tiravanija’s now meme-able gallery-turned-Thai-restaurant (which Musson did satirize beautifully) to Thomas Hirschhorn’s interactive installations, which often rewired one circuit of the city by sending gallery-hoppers—by some labyrinthine process—into neighborhoods that evaded gentrification. Now, Youngman is taking participatory art (“the easiest art to make” after the readymade) and making it even more accessible–in his style.

The artist has taken an invitation extended to him to put on a show at Family Business, Massimiliano Gioni and Maurizio Cattelan’s closet of a Chelsea gallery, and extended it to anyone who can bring in a work of art within the allotted drop off time between March 30th and April 1st. Art, as he explains in the video, constitutes anything from “big ass paintings, little ass paintings” and “bullsh*t ass Instagram photos” to videos (as long as you set up the media player, because he won’t be doing any of that) tax returns and student loan letters. The show, dubbed “It’s a Small, Small World,” will open on April 3rd and run until 16th, so come on down and witness what Youngman’s white friends might call a “sh*tshow” or a “clusterf*ck.”

Family Business, image via L Magazine.

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For those of you still reeling from the Oscars last night (we laughed, we cried), here’s a wonderful video that places four contemporary buildings in Veneto, Italy in the same cinematic splendor as some of the brightest stars to have received that coveted golden statuette. Watch as Tadao Ando’s Factory, Silvia Dainese’s Black Cube, Massimiliano Fuksas‘s Nardini Bull, and Daniel Libeskind’s 9/11 Memorial come to life in this short film, which celebrates each building’s dramatic play with light. Set to scintillating instrumentals, ‘Luce/Light’ guides us through the spaces, allowing us to observe the details and soak in the emotive qualities of each masterful architectural performance.

Luce/Light from Studio-due on Vimeo.

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The place, the image, and the myth of Long Island can evoke everything from the flickering green light in the Great Gatsby to Ina Garten’s epic gravlax plates (to be enjoyed with a Hamptons breeze), or perhaps the burgeoning suburban pop punk scene or a sweet and tangy grandma pizza slice. For a few, however, Long Island brings to mind an impressive list of architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson to John Hejduk and Marcel Breuer. Long Island’s East End was, in fact, once a testing ground for modernist architecture, a place for experimental design, and home to a medley of prototypes that dared to imagine how modern architecture could and should be. In the upcoming film “Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island,” director Jake Gorst pieces together Long Island’s rich architectural history, much of which has been “subtracted from the cultural legacy,” according to the film’s trailer. Gorst attempts to restore the lessons of Long Island’s architecture and learn from the ghosts of modernism driven out by new development. Take a sneak peek at the trailer below.

Modern Tide: Midcentury Architecture on Long Island from Design Onscreen on Vimeo.

[Photo and video via Design Onscreen]

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s start this morning in the shower, specifically the Horizontal Shower. Last week, Dornbracht’s lifestyle-changing bathroom piece was met with equal parts ecstasy and skepticism. Whether this video will win you over or not, we’re not entirely sure, but consider these hydro-powered stone slabs the bathroom fixture equivalent to a French macaron.

xoxo, Dornbracht

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